Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

Chapter Ten.Chunk

Flying Southwest Airlines is analogous to being the last one picked for kickball in the third grade. Initially, an "A" boarding pass feels like you've bypassed some system flaw and managed to come out one step ahead of the game. Getting your preference of any row and then, on top of that, having your choice of window, aisle, or middle seat feels borderline aristocratic. When that "A" boarding pass comes flying out of the ticket kiosk into your palm, the whole airport experience shifts from Dora the Explorer to Princess Grace of Monaco.

That sensation quickly turns around once several "B" passengers walk by and look at you like they'd rather catch herpes from back-to-back elephant sex than share a row with you. The excitement of picking the middle seat in the hopes that none of the passengers will bother to sit right next to you soon diminishes into fear and shame that no one even wants to sit next to you. Traveler after traveler rejects you, causing any spike in self-esteem from nabbing an "A" ticket to plummet into LaToya Jackson territory.

"Fuck off," I wanted to tell the leathery, turban-headed anorexic who saw a more appealing seatmate farther down the plane. "Fuck you and the camel you rode in on." I generally don't start farting until the plane's in the air, so the rejection definitely was not ass-related. I was being tossed aside like a piece of Styrofoam before anyone had even bothered to inquire about my hobbies and/or predilection for prescription pills.

I vowed never to fly Southwest again, but Sarah was having her bachelorette weekend in San Francisco, and her maid of honor booked us all on the only airline that had managed to find pilots and a crew who also happened to be hilarious stand-up comedians.

Normally I would book my own flight for such affairs, but I didn't want to rock the boat for two reasons: (a) This was Sarah's second engagement, so I wanted things to go off without a hitch, and (b) I was physically frightened of her maid of honor, Tanya.

Tanya is a friend from Sarah's childhood, and even though I've met her several times over the years, she still seems somewhat shy until she polishes off three to seven Guinness stouts and then forces you to arm-wrestle her. Although I take pride in working out on a semiregular basis, I do not consider myself capable of winning any sort of wrestling match with a boy, a girl, or any sort of Pacific Islander descendant. I get incredibly anxious when challenged to any test of strength and usually end up pulling a groin muscle no matter where the area of strength being challenged is centralized.

I had steered clear of Tanya for the better part of the weekend, but on the last night in San Francisco we all came back to the main suite to continue drinking, and Tanya slowly but surely transformed herself into Michael Vick. Two of the girls had passed out on the floor, and I knew that being trapped in a hotel room with a dwindling crowd was going to minimize my ability to outmaneuver her.

I was doing everything in my wheelhouse to avoid a one-on-one altercation. I averted eye contact when she tackled an innocent lamp that had said and done nothing to her. When I saw an eight-hour-old chicken finger fly through the living room into the bedroom and heard it split in two, I looked yonder. When gummy bears were being hauled in the direction of my head, with one in particular landing inside my ear, I intercepted further missiles with my hand, deftly masking my movement by cupping my ear and pretending to hear knocking on the door. I did not want to give in to the bully and let her know I found her teasing considerably disappointing.

I did, however, step in when she called room service requesting an omelet with three black men inside. I grabbed the phone out of her hand and told the person on the other end of the phone, "Black beans. An omelet with black beans, please." I hung up the phone, unplugged it from the wall, and hid it in my suitcase.

"God, Chelsea," Sarah said, trying to light a cigarette with the remote control. "You've really turned into a killjoy."

"Did you really just hide the phone?" Tanya asked me as I stood with my hands on my hips. I knew by their reactions that certain measures were going to be dealt as a warning to me and my body.

One by one, the remaining six of us were forced to arm-wrestle again and again. It wasn't Tanya's strength that I found intimidating; it was the starry, retarded way her eyes focused on me, like Mike Tyson getting ready to feed. I didn't even try to put up a fight the first few times, but the celebratory high-fiving and hooting, combined with half a gummy bear's torso still stuck to my eardrum, were reason to grow delirious.

"Fine, you fucker, let's go!" I yelled, getting into position on the floor while my friend Shannon video-recorded what would inevitably turn into a violent episode of The L Word. I hoped I could turn my anger and humiliation into a sort of rabies strength but was reminded time and again who was in charge. Losing in conjunction with the stadium cheering wasn't the worst part; after she beat each one of us, she would leapfrog onto the back of our heads, crushing our faces into the carpeting, and then spank us. It was beyond embarrassing.

The next morning was pretty painful for everyone, and our ride to the airport was quiet. Once we boarded the plane, however, a surge of energy overtook the girls and the conversation quickly turned to Sarah's honeymoon on safari and whether she was planning on letting her fiance fertilize her first egg in the African bush. All the rest of us went through our timelines for children, and inevitably, even though I had put on my eyeshades and was trying to avoid participating in any conversation, I was the last one left to harass.

"I don't want kids," I said without taking off my eyeshades. "That's why I take the morning-after pill every morning, whether I've had sex the night before or not. I also take calcium to keep my bones strong, and Ted and I take Ensure just to stay active." I didn't have the energy or interest in a real conversation and was secretly hoping that Tanya wouldn't order a Bloody Mary when the sky waitress approached. "Has anyone here tried Boniva?" I asked the group.

"You should so have a baby," Tanya advised me.

"Of course she should," Sarah agreed. "She acts like she hates kids, but it's not true. Just look at how she was last night, like a camp counselor. Hiding the phone from us. You're going to change your mind, Chelsea. You'll probably end up with more kids than any of us. Just wait."

I would rather sit next to a transgender person and discuss why every single one I've met smells like a bar in the daytime than listen to people tell me why I want to have children and that I just don't know it yet. I do know, because I'm me and my feelings are the ones in my head. I don't want to have kids, and it's not a device to get attention or have conversations about it. I simply find children incredibly immature and, more often than not, dumb.

"Oh, my God!" Tanya wailed. "Look at this poor dog!" She handed me her BlackBerry so I could look at the picture of the canine. "He's redlined, so they're going to kill him on Monday in San Diego unless you rescue him." I pushed up my eyeshades to see who she was talking to and realized it was me. "He's so sweet. He's beautiful," she persisted.

"Then you get him," I said.

"I just rescued Lucifer three months ago, and he's really skittish still. I have four, and my husband says we're at our limit."

"What about Sarah?" I asked.

"I live in an apartment," Sarah replied, opening a magazine to signal that this wasn't a conversation she was interested in pursuing. Then, for good measure, she snickered and added, "Chelsea, you've been trying to rescue a dog for months."

I didn't have the energy to turn around and punch Sarah in the coslopus. I wanted Tanya to stop talking. I wanted to stop hearing about kids and dogs and even Beyonce if she were to come up. I was weak from the wrestling and from the detox cleanse that Ivory, Sarah, Tanya, and I decided to start that morning. The three of us had committed to do it together in anticipation of Sarah's wedding and were excited at the prospect of losing ten to forty-seven pounds in six days. I had already ordered a thermal track suit to assist in shedding any additional bloat. Like every other time I've tried to deprive myself of food, my head was slowly spinning and a wave of nausea was throwing my equilibrium off course.

I looked at the picture, looked at the tarmac that hadn't started moving yet, and felt feverish. I wondered how long it would take me to get my hands on some Excedrin once the plane landed, and then I wondered how cavemen dealt with hangovers without access to Excedrin. I looked at Tanya, who was staring me down from the seat next to me, and thought that she would have made a good caveman. If getting a dog was what it was going to take to end the conversation so I could sleep, then that's what it was going to take. "Fine. I'll have Eva pick him up tomorrow."

"Who's Eva?" Tanya demanded.

"My assistant."

"You can't have your assistant pick him up, Chelsea. You need to bond with him," she advised me, gripping my wrist very aggressively. I pulled my hand away with a buoyed confidence; we were in public, and she was less likely to harm me with so many witnesses. I was fed up with Tanya and wanted her off my jock.

"I hate to break it to you, but I have a job that requires me to actually be there during the day. I once saw a special on rescuing dogs, and the interview process is more complicated than the one for buying a cleft-palated Vietnamese adolescent. I don't really have time to head to the L.A. pound for a cool four and a half hours during my lunch break. I said I'd get the dog, okay? Can we just press on to something else, like when you're going to confront the fact that you're most likely a lesbian who wants to work as a night guard at a women's detention center?"

Sarah shot me a look, and I changed my tune quickly.

The last occasion when I'd spent time with Sarah's friends from childhood was when her previous wedding was called off and we all gathered at Tanya's mom's house in Brentwood for moral support. For reasons still unknown to me, I took the breakup harder than anyone else, including Sarah. After three days of me sleeping over at Sarah's apartment with the two of us in her bed and me waking up each morning in tears, Sarah basically told me she needed a break.

"I think we need some time apart," she informed me while I was folding her laundry one afternoon and watching Another World. "I've been dumped, I have a wedding to cancel, and I need you to accept it and move on. You need to get your life going in the right direction. It's not healthy for me to be sitting around here every day watching daytime television while you're in a housedress."

I was bringing her down. I had felt so blindsided by the breakup that I didn't know if I would ever be able to date again.

After that it took a while for any of her friends to accept the fact that I wasn't deranged, and I didn't want to cause any more rumblings now. I wanted them to know that I was normal and healthy and could take on responsibilities without shitting my pants.

"I'll get the dog myself," I told Tanya. "I promise."

I did intend to get the dog, but I had zero intention of actually picking it up from the pound. Largely because the words "Los Angeles" came before the word "pound," and the words "Los Angeles" at the beginning of any establishment's name imply to me large, smelly, disorganized rooms filled with large, smelly, disorganized people. My last experience with a circus tent of that caliber was with the L.A. County Women's Prison. L.A. Free Clinic, L.A. Animal Shelter, LAPD-you name it, they all sound appalling. " Los Angeles " came to have the same negative connotation as the word "adult" before something: adult braces, adult diapers, adult acne-all incredibly discouraging.

The day after we returned from the bachelorette weekend, I woke up hallucinating in a pool of my own detoxification sweat. Twenty-four hours of not eating any real food and chugging three thirty-eight-ounce concoctions of something brown had taken their toll on my pituitary gland. By 8:00 A.M. I had vomited three times and made the executive decision that my body had too many toxins to release. Ted looked at me with my head inside the toilet and gently reminded me that starting a cleanse after a weekend of drinking wasn't the smartest life choice for me or my vessel.

"I was trying to do it in solidarity with Sarah for the wedding," I whimpered, with one hand on the side of the cold toilet and the other hand making a chignon out of the hair I was trying to keep from falling in.

"Cleanses are stupid, honey," he said, shaking his head. "Can I get you some ginger ale, or water, or oatmeal?"

"Yes, Ted. Oatmeal sounds fabulous right now. Do we have enough for three bowls?"

Instead I stopped by Del Taco on my way in to work. I ordered a breakfast burrito, and when the drive-through attendant asked if I wanted hash browns or french fries, I yelled, "BOTH, BITCH!" Then I took a picture of the drive-through window on my camera phone and e-mailed it to Ivory and Sarah with a heading attached that read "Breakfast." I didn't e-mail Tanya for obvious reasons.

Eva confirmed that she received my e-mail about the dog but wanted to verify that I was serious about getting it before she headed to the pound. "What if he's a bad dog or something's really wrong with him when I get there?" she asked me. "Do you want me to just make a judgment call, or should I bring him back no matter what?"

"Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Whatever you think."

"Okay, got it," she told me. "Let me just finish alphabetizing your makeup, and I'll try and get back to the office before lunch. And what about Ted? Does he know about this?"

"Yes," I lied.

Eva and Ted were in cahoots, and if you wanted to keep something from one of them, it was best to lie to both.

I was sitting in my partner Tom's office getting ready to tape the show when Eva walked in with the dog. "Here he is!" she said, panting. "They said at the pound that they think he's half chow, half German shepherd, and he's a really good dog. He knows how to sit and give a paw, and his paperwork says his name is Guinness, but his tag says Princess Leia."

"Is he a cross-dresser?" I asked her.

She frowned. "I don't know, but he really is good. I kind of can't believe it." Normally Eva can't be trusted for a real opinion, because she refuses to say anything negative-not my favorite quality in a person-but from what I could deduce, she seemed to be right about the dog.

He was wagging his tail and gently sniffing my coslopus. I stood up in order for the dog to get ahold of himself and assessed the situation. He looked like the dog I grew up with, Whitefoot.

"Are you Whitefoot?" I asked the dog, and waited patiently for a response. "Whitefoot? Is that you?" He wasn't responding to that name, and after I got out my pocket calculator and tapped some buttons, I gave up hope when I realized that Whitefoot would be 247 years old had he faked his own death.

"Chunk" is the nickname I give to anyone I love who I also want to squeeze. I called my mom "Chunk," and she called me "Chunky" when we would snuggle in bed together and I would squeeze her one boob. She had a mastectomy when I was nine and never bothered to get reconstructive surgery, so on one side she had a rice pack that she put in her bra every morning, and on the other side was a giant booby. I call Chuy "Chunk," and I call Ted "Chunk," and of course Sylvan is my "Chocolate Chunk."

My mother, Chunk

"His name will be Chunk," I announced, and then we kissed. After that he followed me everywhere I went. I had to go downstairs to do the show, and when I came back up thirty minutes later, he was standing in the same exact position right outside the elevator. When I went into the bathroom, he followed me in there, and when I closed the stall door for some adult privacy, he slid his body underneath the door and sat directly in front of me while I peed. We had a connection, and, most important, Chunk didn't talk or bark. When he did open his mouth to say something, I said in a very authoritative voice, "NO TALKING!" and he shut it again. After work that day, he hopped right into my car, and he sat in the backseat with his nose on my console. I lowered the windows so he could feel the moist marina wind blow through his snout. "You will eventually need goggles," I informed him.

We got home that night, and I took him for a walk while I braced myself to clean up a giant doggy shadoobie. My childhood experiences involving dog feces had never begun or ended well, and I knew that this was what had held me back from getting a dog earlier in my adult life. Vomit and feces are two reasons I have decided not to procreate. That and the fact that I never want to see the inside of Disney World or a Chuck E. Cheese again. Even as a toddler, I found both establishments insulting. I grabbed the plastic bag available outside the dog run and knew I was at a crossroads, not unlike Beyonce in Dreamgirls. I was turning a corner, and that corner involved a dog's bowel movement.

Right away Chunk and I understood each other. He couldn't do it. He squatted to drop his deuce, then looked at me, then stood back up and ran over to me. I even let him off his leash to allow extra relaxation, but as long as he could smell me, he refused to shadoobie.

The most amazing part was that he was free to escape me permanently but would keep running back to me. I had never had a dog in my life that didn't try to escape when presented with the opportunity, although, in complete fairness, I would have left our family, too, had I had the financial capabilities. Anytime Mutley or Whitefoot, the dogs from my childhood, got loose, we'd have to get into the car and drive around the neighborhood, leaning on the horn, trying to trick the dog into coming back. "Come on, Whitefoot, let's go for a ride," my dad would yell through a megaphone he stole from my softball practice. "Get in the goddamned car!"

When Ted arrived home that night, I said, "Chunk, this is Chunk." Then I turned to Ted and said, "Chunk, meet Chunk."

"What is that?" Ted asked.

"It's a cat."

"Whose is it?"

"He's ours now."

"Very funny. Whose dog is it?"

"He is our dog. I captured him. They were going to assassinate him, Ted. He was going to be put in the electric chair. He's a rescue, like Chuy."

"Chelsea, can you cut the shit, please? We've already had one dog escapade this year. I'm not really in the mood to deal with Dudley Part Deux. You don't even like dogs."

"There is no shit to cut. This was a moment of weakness born out of a moment of detoxification. I like this dog. He seems to understand me and the pickle I've found myself in."

"What pickle is that?"

I eyed Ted and cocked my head to the side. "Wanting someone to snuggle with who doesn't speak."

"Did it ever occur to you to maybe ask me if I wanted to weigh in on the decision, since I live here, too?"

"Not really."

"Chelsea, a dog is a big decision, and we both travel all the time. Who do you think is going to take care of it?"

"Ray is moving here in three days. He loves dogs. It will be his welcoming gift, just like my father's frozen calamari for the renters on the Vineyard. My brother loves dogs."

Ted darted his eyes back and forth between the dog and me, not knowing what to believe. "I'm not stupid. You obviously borrowed the dog from someone."

"Who would I borrow a dog from? You don't borrow dogs from people. You either steal them or find them. Since when are there loaner dogs available?"

"Chelsea, please stop. I've had a long day, and I'm really just not in the mood. This is like that mini-horse you said you were buying for your sister." The mini-horse he was referencing was not a joke at all, and if it was, the joke ended up being on me.

Chuy and I had to take our annual Christmas photo, and one of my producers suggested bringing in a mini-horse he knew about that maybe Chuy could ride. The horse was about three feet tall, and upon sight I made an offer to his trainer, Bruce, to purchase him. Bruce was a giant dick and feigned surprise bordering on disgust when I asked him how much he wanted for the horse.

"This little fella's not for sale," he informed me. "They take a lot of work, a lot of attention," he said with a snicker. Then he added, "And they don't like vodka."

I wanted to kick Bruce in the taint. No one is just one thing. Many things contribute to the whole of a person, and just because vodka accounts for 50 percent of my body weight, that doesn't mean I walk around with a vodka drip, forcing every plant, person, or animal to imbibe. I've always had a disliking for animal trainers, and this guy cemented my theory that people who chaperone animals for a living have never had a girl sit on their face.

I went upstairs after my little incident with the Bruce photo and Googled "mini-horse." There turned out to be several Web sites and several mini-horses available for purchase, and I didn't need some animal trainer to approve the purchase. I learned that, just as with dwarfs, there was some sort of chromosomal deficiency that made these horses so small. I felt an instant connection to these miniature horses because of my work with Chuy, and I needed to have full access to one as soon as possible.

After more research I discovered that it is legal to have a mini-horse as a house pet, as long as you have a backyard that meets certain measurements. Not only did my sister Sloane's yard meet the requirements, but she also had a little girl named Charley, along with a newborn named Russell, whose head Charley liked to squeeze on a semiregular basis. This would be the perfect outlet for her to take her frustrations out on, allowing Sloane more time to figure out why all her babies were born with flat heads.

I called Sloane and gave her the news. "Charley can ride it all day long, and the only thing you have to do is get a fence in your backyard."

She went online to check out the horse and was ecstatic. "Oh, my God! They're so adorable! Why don't you get one?"

"Because, Sloane, I live in a building. I have no yard. They need to be ridden."

"But what about Buddy?"

Buddy was my sister's cat who had been missing for two years. "Sloane, Buddy is gone, and he's not coming back. He could be halfway to Arkansas by now."

"Well, he'd be way past Arkansas by now."

"You don't know that. You don't know what that cat's dreams were. He could have settled in the Midwest. What do you have against Middle America, Sloane?"

"First of all, he's on the Vineyard, because that's where we lost him, so unless he took the ferryboat across to the mainland, he's on the island. Mike and I are going to look again this summer."

"Well, good luck with that plan. In the meantime I see a mini-horse in your future."

Sloane and Mike losing their cat was as predictable in my view as Donny and Marie Osmond making love. They took the cat from a friend who was divorcing and moving into an apartment building that didn't allow animals. I liked the cat because he was significantly overweight and orange, my favorite color for cats, but it was still a cat and basically might as well have been an iguana. Charley terrorized the poor thing, always pulling on its tail and chasing it. The cat's new life sucked. I knew it, Sloane knew it, even my father knew it. "That cat's gonna head for the hills the minute he sees an opportunity. Don't take that cat to the Vineyard if you want to keep him. The very instant he sees the view from our house, he's going to want to live at the beach." The fact that cats hate water and the beach, and could therefore give two shits about an ocean view escaped him-another example of my father believing that anyone who set foot on his land would most surely want to take up full-time residence there.

"What if Buddy does come back, though, and the horse eats him?" Sloane asked me.

"Horses do not eat cats. Coyotes eat cats, and snakes eat cats. Snakes eat people, too, but we're losing focus-we're not getting you a snake. I'll get you the horse, we'll get a big fence to encompass your yard, and I think they just eat grass and hay, right? You'll have to clean up his dumps, which according to my research shouldn't be that massive, but that sounds like a job for Mike."

We agreed I would move forward with the purchase of the mini-horse and have it sent to New Jersey. It was impossible to choose one because they were all so amazing, but I finally selected a little brown nugget horse whose name was Simon. I was hoping to come across one named Bruce, but there was no such luck. I called everyone I knew to tell them about the Web site. Ted, of course, thought the whole thing was a dumb idea. "They're going to get sick of that horse in a week, and Charley will poke it in the eye. The horse will be miserable, and so will Sloane. You don't get something just because it's cute, Chelsea. You have to think things through. This is why I'm never taking you to Africa."

Sloane called me the next day and told me Mike had said no to the horse, and she was starting to think it wasn't such a smart idea either.

"What are you talking about, Sloane? This horse is going to improve your quality of life! Charley will be busy every day riding him like a little cowgirl. You won't have to worry about her pulling Russell's ear off or trying to shove dinner rolls in his ass crack."

"I can't do it, Chelsea. I'm sorry. It just doesn't make any sense."

I didn't talk to Sloane for a few days, and for weeks afterward, every time I saw a horse or a cat, or a horse that looked like a cat, I was an emotional wreck.

I looked at Chunk, who was staring at the leftover hamburger meat in the Ziploc bag in my hand. "He's got an erection," I told Ted.

"Gross."

"Don't shame him! He has to know this is an open household where you can express yourself."

"Can you please tell me whose dog this is Chelsea?" he said, covering his eyes.

"I'm telling you, he's ours. He is part of our family now. It could be worse. What if I decided I wanted a baby? Then you'd really be fucked."

It took Ted a little while, but he finally realized Chunk was no joke and went over to pet him. "Well, what's his name?"

"Red Rocket," I said, staring straight at the dog's boner.

"Chelsea, what is his real name, please?"

"Chunk."

"I thought I was Chunk?" Ted asked. "That's going to confuse both of us. How am I going to know which one of us you're talking to?"

"From now on, Ted," I said, taking a seat at the kitchen table, "I will always be talking to the dog."

"That's great, Chelsea. Has he eaten?" he asked, eyeing the dog.

"Yes, I just made him some hamburger meat and steamed clams. He'll be fine until tomorrow. Eva is picking up some real dog food tomorrow."

"No, Chelsea! You cannot feed a dog clams! In the shell?"

"I can't?"

"Dogs can't eat human food, I'll go down to Ralphs and get him something," Ted volunteered. "I have a special recipe I do for dogs."

"Oh, really? I would like to hear that recipe."

"I do half dry food… and half Alpo," he said, waving his hands around like one of the guys on the tarmac with the orange sticks when your plane lands. I looked at him, walked into my bedroom, and shut the door. Then I opened it, let Chunk (the dog) in, and shut it again. I had no idea where or how to start explaining to Chunk what we were dealing with. How do you explain to a child that his father will try to feed him Alpo? I didn't even know Alpo was still in business, and I certainly didn't know Ted was on their board of directors.

As if this weren't bad enough, the next morning Ted schooled me in dog training. I was in the shower, and Chunk was standing outside, chivalrously looking away while I put my body through a rinse cycle. Ted walked in, said good morning to the dog, then put his hand above Chunk's head and pushed it through the air. He instructed Chunk to "Sit!"-which Chunk did on command. "Chelsea, this is how you to tell a dog to sit," he announced.

I hadn't even finished lathering my shampoo into my hair when I kicked open the shower door. "Oh, really, Dog Whisperer? Is that how you do it?"

"You know what, Chelsea? How am I supposed to know if you know dog tricks?" he said, throwing up his hands in hopelessness.

"Are you being serious right now, Ted? I really must know."

"Chelsea, you don't even like dogs."

"Telling a dog how to sit is not only not a trick, it's probably the single most universal thing in the world, aside from army salutes and brownies." I wished my new dog didn't have to be subjected to this kind of humiliation, but this was his life now, and he needed to know what we were up against. We would be in this together, and I felt relieved to have an ally. Someone who understood me, loved me, and didn't know how to disagree with me.

When I told my sister Sidney about the new addition to my family, she said, "This sounds a little overwhelming for someone with your limited skill set, Chelsea. You've already killed three fish. Have you thought about putting Ted down?"

"I told you Ted said those fish were starter fish who were sacrificing their lives to stabilize our aquarium and then we'd get pretty fish. Why do you keep bringing that up?"

After word spread that I'd gotten a dog, I received some of the most annoying e-mails I've ever encountered. Friends wanting to know if I wanted to arrange doggy play dates, lists of dog parks in my area, advice on what food to feed him, how to socialize him-essentially a collection of people I decided to end friendships with. The only doggy activity I was prepared to do was doggy style, and I'd be lying if I said that hadn't lost its appeal sometime around my sweet sixteen. I always thought people were annoying with their baby advice, but this seemed like it might be worse. I had spent my entire life with one dog or another, and aside from being emotionally unstable, each family dog we had seemed like a pretty cut-and-dried case. They started out as puppies, grew up, and then died, in no specific order.

The one person I allow to take Chunk for overnight visits is my friend Michael. He is a gay man with his own dog and is obsessed with Chunk and insists on calling him "Chunkity Chunk." He has Chunk every Saturday for an overnight slumber party and then reports back to me on Sunday how he and Chunk talked for hours and that dogs are really the only people who understand him.

"I have a special language that dogs understand," he'll tell me in his deep Texan twang. "He'll lie on top of me, and I'll give him a forty-five-minute deep-tissue massage, and he loooooooves it. Then I'll turn on your TV show and watch it, and Chunk will sit down right in front of the TV and stare straight at you. He loves the show! He is such a special dog, Chelsea. I just have such a love for him. He is so funny!"

It's pointless trying to tell Michael that dogs aren't funny, simply because they are dogs and they are incapable of telling jokes or getting them, for that matter. It's pointless to tell Michael much of anything because he is in a world all his own and he has the attention span of an espresso maker. He also has a pretty unhealthy, though seemingly innocuous, relationship with his own dog.

I wanted to make sure there was nothing going on with Chunk that I would be alarmed by. "You're not putting your finger in my dog's asshole, right?" I asked him one afternoon on the phone. I didn't really believe that he was, but I had just finished Mia Farrow's autobiography and I didn't want to be one of those mothers who let their child hang out with a Woody Allen type who was doing inappropriate things to their flesh and blood.

"Chelsea Handler, I would never, ever put my finger in any dog's asshole. I wouldn't hurt any animal on this earth for all the money in the world. I love dogs, and I love Chunk, and I think you know that I would never hurt a fly."

"That's not the point, Michael. You can never fit your finger into a fly's asshole."

"Chelsea, please don't do this."

"Okay, sorry. As a mother, I just had to ask."

"I understand," Michael told me. "I do think Chunk is gay, though. And also I want to be put in your will just in case you die, so that I get Chunk. Ted won't care, right?"

Michael still takes Chunk every weekend, and I know he doesn't stick anything in his asshole, because Chunk gets so excited every time Michael shows up to take him. And I know Chunk is straight because he tested negative for the gay virus.

Chunk still follows me around all the time, but he has chilled out a little bit, mostly because he saw the toll it was taking on me when Ted did the same thing. Once in a while, Ted and I will forget to put food away and then come home to find the remains of a wheel of Brie spread across our duvet and Chunk passed out next to the bed. It happens only every so often, but when it does, our entire condo smells like a foot and I'm convinced that my mother has reincarnated herself as Chunk. Spreading Brie over my bedspread and coming back to life as a dog is totally something my mother would do.

To this day Chunk has still not taken a dump in front of me, and I respect him for it. I always said I would never get a dog until they came out with one that either doesn't take a dump or knows how to bartend. The fact that Chunk has no problem taking a dump in front of Ted makes me respect him more. I hope that one day soon the two of them can take dumps together.

My dog, Chunk